


Retirement Party

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Blood, headcanoning gone wild, nothing's ever wasted, ritual blood drinking, ritual blood sacrifice, weird citadel rituals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 16:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17165075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: Some folks were headcanoning about ritual blood sacrifice in Mad Max Fury Road and this fic sprung from that discussion. Imperator Boneshake is my OC.





	Retirement Party

It has been a long time since Furiosa has stepped into the massive, fan-shaped ceremony chamber. It looks different somehow; bigger and smaller at the same time. The pups say sometimes that the hallways and chambers move at night. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, you’re trapped when they do, and you scream and scream and scream, but the stone shushes you and you die before anybody else realizes you’re missing.

Pup-stories, nothing more. Placeholders for the true horrors of the world, which they’ll face soon enough.

Furiosa, one among a dozen or so Joe-chosen people, takes her cues from those in front of her: they veer toward the narrow end of the room and arrange themselves in a reverent half-circle around a stone platform, raised to waist height, big enough for a man’s body laid flat.

Which is exactly what the platform bears: Imperator Boneshake, now truly living up to his name. His normally deeply-tanned hide is bone-pale even without warboy powder; beneath it rests the uneasy blue of approaching death. The fearsomely accurate outline of a skeleton carved in puffed outline on his body is flushed pink, and it screams mockingly against the bluewhiteness of his flesh. Blood has dried to a dark maroon crust in the creases of the skin on his belly and sides. His belly takes a sickening dip right above his beltline, and the topography immediately below it is flatter than it should be. His black trousers can only do so much to hide the misshapen tangle of lumps and dips that fill his trouser legs. He trembles. Shock, Furiosa thinks. Or maybe cold. It’s not warm in the chamber, which smells like it hasn’t been opened in a long time.

She glances up at the ceiling, which yawns into darkness. The Citadel’s entire crop of warboys and pups, save for a few sentries, crowd the back of the chamber and the quadruple-layer of ledges on the back wall, each ledge about four warboys deep and long enough to hold thirty. Filthy, flickering electric lightbulbs have been strung around the entire chamber at eye level. Hung over the middle of the room on a chain is a giant spider made of metal and light, its legs curled tightly upward in death.  Half of the bulbs that make its feet are broken or dead. The entire thing cants precariously to the side. A hook hangs beside it, directly over Boneshake.

The sound of shuffling feet and voices subsides, but Furiosa can still hear the echoes arguing like soft-voiced crows in the dark corners of the ceiling. Her arm itches, and her fingernails click against steel as she reaches to scratch.  _Damn it._

Furiosa hears Joe’s boots before anyone else does; she glances to the door. Joe enters among a ripple of hushed voices, which he parts like the war rig through a sea of loose sand. With a hunter’s eyes, Furiosa follows him until he stops on the other side of Boneshake’s platform. Joe rests his hands on it, leans over the man upon it: a protective father, a jealous predator, and regards his subjects with glittering gimlet eyes.

“My children,” Joe begins, his ragged, rolling voice a dropped bomb in the echoing quiet, “you are here to bear Witness to a deliverance. Boneshake has executed his duty as Imperator honorably. He has served his Immortan faithfully. And he shall be rewarded.” Joe straightens and opens his arms in an all-encompassing gesture. An angry red boil near his armpit glares at Furiosa. “It is by my hand all will rise from the ashes of this world. It is by my hand Imperator Boneshake will look upon the lighted gates of Valhalla. Bear Witness to his end in this world, which is my glory in the next!”

If Joe’s voice is a dropped bomb, the great and worshipful cry that goes up from the massed warboys and pups behind her is a world-ending nuke: “ _WITNESS! WITNESS! WITNESS!”_  Like a physical thing, the sound slams against the stone, which pulses it back against the rhythm of the voices. Shout and echo go to war above their heads, and the battle rattles the hollow places in Furiosa’s chest.

Joe raises his arms in a double-stop gesture and both voices and V8 salutes drop like dead flies. In the remaining echo, Joe accepts a long, wickedly curved knife from the First Prime. Its handle is an armbone. The Prime returns to his place. The Second Prime breaks rank and hands Joe a battered cup with a wide mouth and a stem. The last remaining flecks of gold leaf on it gleam dully. The Second Prime V8s and returns to his place.

Those chosen to stand with Joe are carefully arranged by rank: his sons Rictus and Corpus form one end of the half-moon; next to them slouches the Organic Mechanic, eyeing the whole production with lazily lascivious hunger. Joe’s mute attendants—pups with hollow mouths—stand next. The First and Second Primes stand beside Furiosa. To her left stands the full-life young man she and the Primes have been training to replace Boneshake. He is barely nine thousand days old, but that’s already longer than some warboys live. Love and pride and terror flit like blown sparks in his eyes. The rest of the arc is Ace, the chief warboy; the chief blackthumb; the chief greenthumb; and Organic’s lieutenant, the chief redthumb, half-lives all.

Joe holds the knife over his head. Its surface looks raw and flayed; whoever sharpened it sheared too much. “For the Immortan!” he bellows. Several hundred warboy throats echo his call. Then Joe holds up the goblet. “For Valhalla!” The room shudders to contain the returning cry. Furiosa’s lips form the words, but she lends no other power to Joe’s dogma.

Joe deposits the goblet by Boneshake’s head and hooks that arm under his neck. Both men struggle to lift Boneshake into a sitting position. Furiosa senses both Primes tense, ready to jump to Joe’s aid, but neither need move. Boneshake’s chest rises and falls rapidly; what blood is left in him drains away from his face and chest, leaving even his scars pale. His eyes, dark and piercing despite the relentless blast of the sun, jitter and flick under his half-closed lids, as if loosed from their moorings. With great effort, Boneshake wills his eyes to open and focus on Joe, cradling him under a bath of warm golden light.

“I—Immortan—thank you—love you–” He whispers.

Almost too quickly for Furiosa to follow, Joe flicks the knife over Boneshake’s neck. Boneshake jerks and sighs. A ripple of reverent sound rolls toward her back from the warboys behind her. The sheets of blood pouring down Boneshake’s chest Furiosa expected don’t come. Joe expertly nicked the vein so that blood gouts in a thick velvet rope directly into the once-golden goblet. In his eerily serpentine way, Organic moves to Joe’s side and produces a stained blood bag (not the human kind) and a funnel. Boneshake’s limply jerking body obscures Organic’s hands, but Furiosa assumes he’s collecting Boneshake’s blood. Boneshake had been caught under a Buzzard buggy’s wheels; using the hook to hang him by his shattered legs wouldn’t do. Not when his screams would drown out Joe’s stentorian bellows.

The crowd behind her susurrates, the sound a living, moving, breathing thing.

So among the warboys’ hushed murmurs, Joe and Organic move silently and efficiently. Boneshake’s mouth works, forming words he’d never speak. His eyes bug wide and then roll up to the light-spider, as if asking it if it knows the way to Valhalla—or is Valhalla. Then they seem to shrink back into his skull. His entire body seems to shrink; he sags in Joe’s arm as his heart, unable to slurp enough blood to beat, gives out. Joe staggers under his sudden dead weight, something only those in the chosen arc see. They see, but they know better than to speak.

That’s why, Furiosa muses, they’re there.

Organic, holding the neck of a full blood bag in his teeth and another one in his fist, helps Joe ease Boneshake’s body flat again. Boneshake’s head lolls toward her, and a broad smudge of blood on his cheek is so red it’s black against the lurid whiteness of his skin. His eyes are two drying craters in the moon of his face. The black mark of his station is gone.

Organic melts into dimness—where, Furiosa neither knows nor cares–and Joe raises the goblet above his head. Carefully now, because it’s brimming full. Another rumble of sound flows through the crowd.

“I, Redeemer Immortan, have carried my beloved child Boneshake through the gates of Valhalla, where he now dwells in my eternal glory. I remain in this desolate land to guide the rest of my children to eternal life in my name, and to lift up the world to a new vision: of Valhalla remade, here on earth, by my hand. You, my faithful warboys, are the engines upon which I will carry this vision. Rejoice with me, my children, for your brother Boneshake now sings to us from Valhalla, sings my song, my vision, my glory, for all to hear!”

Furiosa grits her teeth against the second detonation of sound. It’s loud enough to scare Boneshake’s soul back into his empty body, but no such miracle happens. Not here, not while Joe believes he can craft his own miracles out of dust and breath. The warboys weave their fingers together in fervent V8s and the stone returns their chants: “ _ **IM-MOR-TAN! IM-MOR-TAN! IM-MOR-TAN**_!” and Joe feeds on the roar like a flower in full morning sunlight.

_If any medicine could make his sores ease, it’s this one,_  Furiosa thinks to herself, noting the trembling in Joe’s arms. He’d been holding the full cup aloft for a long time. Finally he can hold it no longer, and jerkily lowers the cup to his chest. A thread of blood leaks over the side of the cup and slides down the curve of it and onto Joe’s powdered fingers.

As the chanting quiets, Joe eyes each one of them in the chosen circle. Furiosa returns his burning skyblue gaze, which has more than once cowed her. She dips her head, not because she is cowed now, but because it’s policy. She feels the blue boom of those eyes on her.

“Come,’ he says after a while, “come, my children, drink.”

His voice is quieter but no less imperious. Rictus wheels his brother around the platform. He takes the cup with childlike hesitancy in a man’s grip and sips. His father nods once, then Rictus holds the cup to Corpus’ lips. It overflows; a rill of blood splashes onto Corpus’ face and down his stunted barrel chest. He coughs out the blood that had managed to land in his mouth, and Rictus hurriedly pulls him back in line. The attendants take their turns; as do the Primes. They all manage without spilling a drop. None of them looks at Joe, who has regained something of the predatory jealousy with which he’d loomed over Boneshake’s broken body.

Furiosa, however, catches his eyes and holds them, blasted-out blue to jeweled, defiant green, from her first step out of line to her last step back. She dips the cup to her lips but does not swallow any; she only allows a small curve of red to touch her upper lip. Enough to satisfy ceremony and Joe, which are the same thing anyway.

Boneshake’s successor’s hands are shaking as he drinks. Once everyone has taken their taste of the glory of Joe’s Valhalla, Joe places the cup beside Boneshake’s head. It’s still mostly full. Organic will probably add it to his stocks, which will then be used to fuel whichever warboys are lucky enough to get doses. This is the first time she’s been a part of an Imperator’s retirement, so she does not know who will choose them, or if it matters. She’s tired of standing here under the dim spiderlight, tired of listening to Joe’s yawping, tired of smelling the all-too-familiar coppery bite of blood and the greydark smell of old stone, tired of the warboys hooting behind her. Her arm itches and hurts at the same time, which makes no sense because it isn’t even there anymore. Hasn’t been there for hundreds of days, and yet sometimes she can still make it twitch behind the pawlike clawlike steel of her new-fitted prosthetic.

She’s tired of this meaningless shit. Tired of Joe somehow,  _somehow_  finding a way to twist every good and bad thing that has happened under the damned, bitter sun into a piece of propaganda—she will never stop thanking Miss Giddy for teaching her that word—for his own fucked-up vision of nowhere and nothing at all.

Tired of the fear that one day she’ll be nothing more than blood cupped in Joe’s hands or a greasy streak under tire treads—nothing more than this, with nothing to show of her home but a memory as dead and dark as the smudge of blood on Boneshake’s irrelevant cheek.

“Turn, and show my warboys what I have bestowed upon you,” Joe commands in a gravelly growl. They all obey, about-facing to the strange two-toned crowd of warboys, their pale white upper bodies seeming to float in the dimness beyond the spiderlight’s reach.

“My children,” Joe bellows, “look upon your Imperators, your chieftains, your betters, your brothers in glory, and see how I have blessed them! See how a mere sip of my glory has filled them with strength!”

Rictus, ever yearning to please his father, lets loose a lionlike roar and flexes his muscles, which strain against the skin nearly too tight to contain them. The Primes send up their warcries. Even the attendant pups squeal as fearsomely as they can, their tongueless mouths wide in tiny snarls. Furiosa knows she must join this idiot chorus or risk Joe’s suspicion, so she fills her lungs and releases in a guttural scream, full of the fire and fury expected of her, and grief and hatred and sorrow festering blackly in the bottom of her brain, which she dare not ever express any other way; the dark but fertile muck from which the boundless well of her rage springs.

Her own screams shiver her out of herself; her vision blurs and the warboys’ raucous cheers seem to pass through her as if she were but a congealing of the air. It’s only when her lungs begin to burn that she slams back into her body.

She blinks, dismayed at a sudden whirl of vertigo, and turns to Boneshake’s successor, who has placed a hand on her shoulder. He jerks his head toward the exit, and Furiosa gratefully follows. Rictus pulls the door shut behind them, and the constant buzz of the warboys’ cheers is cut off neat as scissors through a tomato stem.

As if upset at this, Furiosa’s ears begin to ring. She shakes her head, but the gesture is useless.

“What’ll happen now?” Boneshake’s successor asks nervously, of anyone who would answer.

“Nothin’ for you to worry about right now, pup,” the Second Prime gruffs. “The Immortan and Organic’ll dole out doses o’ Valhalla-blood to whatever warboy Joe’s finger lands on, whoever looks the most revved-up, yeah, ‘n then they’ll send ‘im down to the Underpeople.  If he’s lucky, one of his bones might make it back topside as a knife like the one the Immortan had.”

“And if he’s unlucky?”

The Second Prime shrugs. “Ain’t no bad luck for him nummore, pup. He’s Mcfeastin’ in Valhalla now, innee.”

This satisfies the young man, who takes a deep breath and smiles on the exhale.

Furiosa grits her teeth against a snarl and turns for the motor pool.


End file.
